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Transcription is a selective process based on theoretical goals and definitions. The vast majority of the data was transcribed from tapes of speakers at podium-style meetings in two AA international conventions held in different cosmopolitan cities in the Far East.
International conventions are organized by AA groups to allow members from different areas to meet each other, people from other 12-step programmes, and interested outsiders. Convention meetings are therefore ‘open’, AA group meetings being more normally ‘closed’ and confined to AA members.
The speakers were aware they were being recorded, as tapes were available to those present and other interested parties. However, all speakers were primarily addressing the audience, so the fact that they were being taped was incidental.
Nonetheless, in order to get the flavour of the more informal smaller group meetings, some of the material used was reconstructed from memory and notes. These notes were taken at meetings of a local AA group in one of the cities where the conventions were held. It is in small, closed meetings that accounts of everyday experience and problems are better told, and I felt requesting to record such meetings would have been an imposition and too obtrusive. Though the material may be typical, it is not claimed that it is fully representative of all sharing in AA meetings.
The taped spoken material itself was transcribed according to the conventions of conversational analysis (CA) (Jefferson, 1978) but simplified, particularly in regard to timed pauses, a feature not considered theoretically salient in the context of AA meetings where the interactive order is characterized by extended, nonnegotiated turns, initiated and closed solely by the speaker.
The participants were mainly Westerners living as expatriates in cosmopolitan cities and come from many parts of the English-speaking world, particularly the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia.